


Stuck

by Boldly_going_places



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Exo dreams, Gen, Getting lovingly bullied, Ghost & Guardian banter, and throw in some empathy for our eliksni buddies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28082850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boldly_going_places/pseuds/Boldly_going_places
Summary: One of Earth's greatest warriors and protectors gets stuck on Europa.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

Anda-3 hated the cold. She couldn’t feel it, but it was inherent from when she had flesh and blood. And it made her metallic joints stick. Part of her robes had been torn at the elbow, an errant shot from a vandal’s rifle, and the joint was creaking in the typical Europa snowstorm.

“Can’t believe you convinced me to come here,” she muttered to the air. Hera appeared near her elbow, scanning the area before mending it.

“What, you don’t like the ominous pyramids and eerily pristine Bray labs?” her Ghost said, floating up to eye level. “Besides, it’s the new big thing. You can’t keep betting all your glimmer away on Crucible matches if you don’t have any to gamble with.”

Anda scoffed. “There’s still plenty to do on the moon.”

Hera spun her shell, as clear a sign as a raised eyebrow of judgement.

“Okay, fine, not the moon. Nessus then. Or—” Anda shuddered, “the shore.”

“We could always stay on Earth.”

“We were on Earth for months. Despite the size, it’s shockingly easy to get bored of.” Anda thunked her head against the wall of the cave she had hunkered down in. “But Europa. God Europa it’s so—”

“Cold? That’s the fourth time you’ve said that in the last, oh I don’t know, hour?” Hera did a very obvious full scan of her. “And look at that—despite what you might think, there is literally no way you could be effected by this in your robes and the ever present protection of the Light. Capital L.”

Anda swatted at her, but she disappeared in a shimmer. _< C’mon, guardian. There’s a lab we could clear out not to far from here. Oh, maybe we’ll find more of those little vacuum guys.>_

Anda’s sigh turned into a groan, a punch against the cave wall, then a tentative peak outside her temporary refuge. Visibility was probably only fifteen feet, so she opted for the slower walking method than the potential of diving head-first off a glacial cliff on her sparrow.

_< Oh, and Ikora wanted more samples of the glacial starwort for one of her teams to study.>_

Anda sighed and shook her head. “Glacial starwort.”

There were a few Fallen on a far off ridge. Anda stopped to watch them for a second, and they were undoubtedly watching her. Her sniper rifle had the range, but instead she awkwardly raised an arm in some kind of greeting—they returned it, just as half-hearted. They would probably end up shooting at each other not so far in the future.

“Here!” Hera appeared at a small opening that was half-covered in snow. “This is the entrance.”

More snow. Great. She slid into the hole and wiped off her robes before anything could melt on her. Only Hera’s light illuminated the area—one of those places that wasn’t important enough to scout out when the Vanguard initially sent people to Europa. Perfect. Hera floated to a control panel on the wall, and a few lights flickered on. It wasn’t nearly as well maintained as the labs that they usually traversed.

It was only a small entrance room. There was an automatic door that was stuck part-way open. Anda stuck her arm into it, then her leg, then attempted to get the rest of her body through. She gripped the other side of the door and pulled, wiggled like a worm stuck in a hole, then sagged.

“No way,” she said, and pulled herself out. Tried to pull herself out. “No way,” she said, not in defeat, but with the dawning realization that she was the Traveler’s chosen warrior to protect the people of Earth and create peace throughout the galaxies and she was stuck in a broken automatic door in some shitty lab on Europa. “No way. Hera!”

Hera appeared on the other side of the doorway. “Yes?”

“Um.” With the hand still stuck on the other side of the door, she gestured as well as she could to herself. “Help?”

“What seems to be the issue.”

“Hera! I’m stuck. Please help.”

“Hmm, I see. Now, in case you couldn’t tell I’m a small creature. I don’t know what you want me to do about this.”

“Get me out of here!” Anda thrashed her arms. “Please.”

“I’ll think about it. Oh!” Hera turned around, her blue eye disappearing from view. There was a whirring. “The vacuum robots!”

“Hera! Don’t do this to me!” But the little light was gone, into another room that Anda couldn’t quite turn her head to see. “Fuck,” she whispered, and tried again to get out.

The metal pressing into her from the door chilled her through the robes. Her elbow was getting creaky again. Snow was drifting in through the entrance. At the very least, nobody was here to see her like this…stuck…halfway into a lab that probably had nothing but scrap metal…abandoned by her Ghost…

There was shuffling behind her. She fumbled for her hand cannon that was strapped to her back, but couldn’t quite reach. Then the sound of a pair of feet landing on the metal floor. Anda froze when she saw who it was.

A Dreg.

She stopped breathing (one of those habitual things that her human psyche never forgot to do, except in moments of extreme duress. Or embarrassment. And at this moment, she couldn’t decide which one was winning). She couldn’t reach her weapon. But they weren’t holding a weapon either. In fact, they looked just as shocked to see her as she was to see them. Instead of panicking, she waved, small and low, and smiled, forgetting that she had a helmet on.

“Come here often?” she said.

They moved slowly to the same control panel that Hera had used to turn on the lights and pulled off the main console, fiddled with a few wires, and the door hissed open. Anda flopped gracelessly onto the ground.

“Anda?” Hera was still corporeal in the room over.

“I’m good!” she said. Neither the Dreg or she moved, both watching each other. Anda wasn’t really a big fan of attacking people who did her favors. She really hoped that they hadn’t freed her just to shoot her. And if they were here to salvage or scavenge anything, well…Anda wasn’t particularly the scavenging type. There would still be a bunker to explore when they were done. “Thank you.”

She got up slowly, watching the Dreg the whole time. They weren’t moving.

Hera came flying into the room, only to pull up short on seeing the fallen. “Oh!” she said. “Anda…are you gonna…?”

“No.” As Anda moved toward the exit, the Dreg moved opposite her, a counterweight, circling. Just as her back was at the exit, she said. “Thanks.” Then she crawled out of the bunker/lab with just as much grace as she did anything (that is, with very little grace at all).

She slumped through the snow and situated herself under a half-broken roof not too far away. A canister of glacial starwort sat against a pillar. Nice. Hera transmatted it away.

“That was weird, right?” Hera asked, remaining a disembodied voice in Anda’s head.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Didn’t seem like either of us wanted trouble.”

“Do you think he was one of Variks’ guys?”

“I don’t know.” Anda crossed her arms and leaned against the pillar.

“By the light. You’re embarrassed aren’t you?”

“It’s a little embarrassing.”

“Come on! It was funny!”

Despite herself, she exhaled a laugh. “Okay. It was a little funny.”

“And you’re fine and alive, so no big deal.”

The wind gave up and the storm started to pass. From where she peaked around the pillar, there were two or three other guardians hopping around the area, a few Fallen patrols watching them. Cannon fodder.

“Does Variks have guys?” Anda asked.

“What?”

“I don’t know, he sort of runs the show here—I mean, besides House Salvation—but I’ve never seen any of his guys. It’s more likely that Spider’s people would show up to give us a hand with something than anybody Variks knows.”

“So what?”

“I don’t know, Hera. I’m just thinking. I mean, what was a lone Dreg doing in some old lab? Don’t you think they’d have better places to go? The most that could possibly be in there is one of those robots you love so much.”

“I _think_ that you’re thinking too hard. You’re just lucky you didn’t get taken out. Or, for that matter,” Hera appears in front of her with a flourish, “that _I_ didn’t get taken out.”

“Very self-centered.”

Hera expanded in indignation. “If I die, you do too. You do know that right?”

Anda clenched her hand. The snow made her feel one kind of cold. The thought that she might lose Hera some day filled her with a different kind of cold altogether. “You’re not going to.”

The Ghost contracted, then floated close to bump into her Guardian’s helmet. “No, obviously not.”

Hera’s shell was iridescent, glimmering from blue to pink when she twirled. There were a number of iterations she had gone through, but this one seemed to stick. Hera disappeared with a shimmer. Anda poked her head back around the corner, to the entrance of the bunker/lab. The dreg was just crawling out with a few things—looked like junk to her, but she didn’t have an eye for that kind of stuff.

Alone. The Dreg was alone. That was the feeling she didn't like. That was the cold she hated.

Hera appeared in front of her again. "Okay, what's the plan?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been really wanting to post some of that sweet guardian content and I love these two who now live rent free in my head. Yes i made my original exo guardian when I was sixteen, yes she looks wack, yes i love her. Also, yes I have a minimal understanding of the lore, because i just realized it's in game. I love comments and kudos, so please let me know if you liked this or literally anything at all. And if... perhaps... anybody wants to see more of these guys... haha jk jk... unless?


	2. Unstuck

Anda spent another week on Europa before going back to the City. The cold had finally gotten to her when she froze her fingers together while digging out a capsule of starwort, and had to meticulously unfreeze them by pulling what little solar energy she could to her palms. And right after she did that she got shot through the temple by some Vandal sniper. So yeah. Eruopa was not the way.

Ikora was happy with the starwort, but Anda hadn’t done anything particular there, besides go on a few patrols and messed around with some Bray Tech relics. And when Anda had stopped in to give the Warlock Vanguard a quick update on Europa, Ikora hadn’t seemed particularly impressed with her more hands off approach to the whole ‘being a Guardian’ thing.

“I don’t know how anybody impresses that lady.” They were back in Anda’s quarters, the Exo herself flopped back onto her bed.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, An, but maybe you should be more focused on what you can do for the City than impressing one Vanguard.” Hera transmatted away her armor to a shelf on the other side of the room.

“Ask not what the City can do for you, but what you can do for your City,” she said in a deep voice. “That it?”

“Yes,” Hera said without a touch of irony.

Anda clicked her jaw a few times in annoyance. “Do we still have that space heater I picked up from Maevic Square?”

“Are you really that cold?”

Anda shivered dramatically. “Yes.”

“It’s under your desk.” Hera landed on the desk, on a pile of cloth that Anda had constructed for her a few months ago. Anda crawled out of the bed just far enough to grab the space heater and flick it on. She stayed stretched out halfway on the floor, halfway on her bed while the unit heated up, and started to relax once it seeped into her silicon joints.

“I think you’re being a little dramatic.”

“Hera, I have _never_ been dramatic in my entire second life.”

Hera rolled her eye.

The warmth seeped into her joints, into her mechanical bones, and her eyes started to flicker.

“Anda…” The Ghost nudged at her face where it was planted into the ground. “At least get into bed.”

Anda grumbled as she crawled back into the cot and pulled her blanket tight around her. It was a quilt she had bought from a market in the City only a few months ago, when she had first been resurrected. The last thing she remembered before dropping off to sleep was Hera nestling into the crook of her neck.

_The Crypt stood like a gravestone in the distance, the field leading up to it, empty. Anda ran her hands along the grasses as she walked to the structure in the distance. It wasn’t calm, per se. It wasn’t much of anything, actually, just the disembodied awareness that she was moving toward something._

_This is how the dream always went. She would wake up before she reached anything, with a discomfort that sat in the back of her mind._

_And then the dream changed. There was a gun in her hand, heavier than what she was used to, and a Dreg stood on the other side of the field. It had gotten cold—cold enough to seep into her bones, to eat away at any heat from her reactors, to stall her fans and motors._

_She ran toward the dreg. They were scared. She saw it in all of his eyes as she raised her gun and_

woke up with a jerk. Anda scrambled from the quilt and bed, detangling herself and knocking half-conscious Hera onto the ground with the effort. She was hot—if she were organic, she’d be sweating. Instead, every exhale was matched with a puff of mist in an attempt to cool her systems.

She had never seen anybody in her dreams before. Especially not a Fallen. Other Exos talked about seeing people they knew in their dreams, but they would never go into it. It always sounded like she was lucky not to have experienced it…at least now she knew why. She’d killed Fallen before. With glee. But something about it made her sick. Like it wasn’t her pulling the trigger.

“Anda?” Hera had collected herself from off the floor.

Anda grabbed her armor and started putting it on. “We’re going back.”

“Back?”

“To Europa.”

“You hate Europa.”

She fell onto the bed as she tried to pull on the pieces of her under armor. “We have to find that dreg.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The one who helped me.”

“Slow down.” Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped her gauntlet when she tried to clasp it on. “Let me do this.”

The familiar tingle of atomic transference overtook her body, and she was in her gear. She straightened out her robes and stomped out into the quiet belly of the tower, brushing past a cleaning frame and making it to the hangar before Hera asked, “Why are we going back?”

“I told you. We have to find the Dreg.”

“Right.” Hera floated alongside her for a beat. “Why?”

She stopped and looked into the City, up to the Traveler. Anda wasn’t here for the Red War, but she recognized it was scarred—looking up to something unreachable. She clicked her jaw a few times. “Because he was in my dream.”

Hera’s core pulsed a few times in thought. “Was it the Crypt?”

Clenching her hand, she made eye contact with the ghost. “Yes.”

They looked at each other for a few moments, before Hera flew past her toward the ship. “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Anda called after her.

“Yep. But we have to be back before next week. You’re supposed to go on some mission for Ikora. I think it’s a test.”

The guardian jogged to catch up with her Ghost.

* * *

“What do you think’s so special about this Dreg?”

There was nothing special about him, that’s what she wanted to say. But it wasn’t quite true. A lone Dreg with no discernible House banners, not even Exile. He wasn’t dead, which was a miracle itself, and he didn’t try to kill her. He was scavenging, so he had somebody to sell to or something to make. Initially, she had thought he might belong to the Spider, but Spider’s guys were…distinct.

But only part of that made him special. He helped her out without asking for anything in return. And it hadn’t seemed important at first, but Anda’s dream made it clear that she had tucked it away in a part of her brain titled _Important: Save for Later._ So.

And maybe “special” wasn’t the right word. Peculiar. Weird. Stand-out-ish.

Anda leaned on the dash of the ship, resting her chin on her fist. “I just have a feeling.”

“You’re not going to elope are you?”

She scoffed and flicked Hera’s shell. “No, I’m not going to _elope_ with a _Fallen.”_

Hera lifted a few plates of her shell in an approximation of a shrug. “Wouldn’t be the first time. It’s like those old clips of lions taking in baby gazelles, then eating them a few days later.”

“Okay, now that’s just rude.”

“I’m just saying!” Hera projected a document with a title _Employee Handbook._ “And I’m pretty sure I’d have to report you if you started getting feelings for the enemy, according to section 23, subsection B, line V. So don’t get any ideas.”

Anda crossed her arms and sat back in the chair. “You’re the worst, you know that?” Then, “There’s not actually a handbook is there?”

“Anda!”

“Obviously not! Okay, okay!”

Europa came into view not long after, the red ice glowing off the white canvas. Hera brought the ship into orbit and transmatted them both to the surface, outside Variks’ outpost. Anda flew past on her sparrow without saying hi, toward Eventide, and hopefully some sign of the Dreg.

It was unlikely he would hang around the ruins for too long—too much House Salvation presence—but he might have a bunker somewhere, a little hide out not so far from it, maybe in one of the tunnels that lead from one area of Europa to another. Anda slowed her roll as she came into the area leading from the Abyss to Eventide and scanned the area. Nothing, nothing, nothing—

< _Life form! >_ Hera said.

On her left. Anda hopped off her sparrow and crept toward the walls, trying to keep her footfalls light and presence unknown. She ducked behind a steel beam and surveyed this side of the tunnel. There were a handful of places somebody could be hiding, but barely anywhere that somebody could be living. She was just about to give up when there was a slight movement about twenty feet up, a glint of metal, signifying movement.

Instinctively, Anda reached for her gun, but stopped before grabbing it. It wouldn’t look good if she wanted to make peace…or something like that. She made noise as she approached the hole, hoping to alert the Dreg to her presence, but not scare him off.

She waited under the hideout to assure that he wasn’t going to bolt or attack immediately. The air didn’t feel particularly tense, and she couldn’t hear anything from inside the hole, which wasn’t saying much considering how high up it was.

 _< Maybe you should say something?>_ Hera said inside her head.

< _Like what? ‘I’m not gonna shoot you’? >_

_< That’s a start.>_

Anda shook her head, and started up the side, using half-broken beams and walkways to guide her. What could she say? _Do you recognize me?_ Don’t shoot. Hey, man, how’s it going? As lost in thought as she was, she didn’t notice the blaster until it was pointed directly in her face. Huh. The climb went faster than she anticipated.

He said something in Eliksni.

She held one hand up in surrender and held onto the ledge with her other. “Um…take me to your leader?”

And when he shot her point blank, she definitely deserved it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anda, three minutes after leaving Europa: thank FUCK that's over
> 
> Anda, after having a dream about her definitely not Eliksni crush: I would suffer a million winters to learn his name
> 
> Hera, in the background: I canNOT believe you're actually a warlock
> 
> Thank you for reading! As always, I love kudos and especially comments! I'm planning on writing at least one more chapter that may or may not be slightly romantic, and maybe more. I love these two and I hope you guys do, too!


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